While i am doing my projects, i had a requirement for file download, File type will be changed, So i made a research on this and made simple useful script which can be use any where to prompt download by giving path and file name . Let us create a function download_file and pass full file path and filename , we can use third argument to mention the MIME Type of file

download_file($sourceFile, $fileName, $mime_type = '')

Next we can check whether we have permission to read the file.if not it will return 404 error

Next we are going to set mime type if we already pass the MIME type into function it will take that MIME ,else we are going to use a function pathinfo to retrieve the extension of file and we will compare with already created array to get content type

That is it !!!!! Now we can have a look, How we can read the file using created function We can make a path file and the name we want to give while downloading and pass to function . It will download prompt for file. example for reading file and download prompt